Mar 20, 2026
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56 min
Analyzing a TidyTuesday dataset with Posit Assistant in RStudio | Hadley Wickham | Data Science Lab
The Data Science Lab is a live weekly call. Register at pos.it/dslab! Discord invites go out each week on lives calls. We’d love to have you!
The Lab is an open, messy space for learning and asking questions. Think of it like pair coding with a friend or two. Learn something new, and share what you know to help others grow.
On this call, Libby Heeren is joined by Hadley Wickham who uses Posit’s new Posit Assistant (not to be confused with Positron Assistant or Databot in Positron) in RStudio to analyze the week’s TidyTuesday dataset.
Hosting crew from Posit: Libby Heeren, Isabella Velasquez, Hadley Wickham
Hadley’s Blueskey: https://bsky.app/profile/hadley.nz Hadley’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hadleywickham/ Hadley’s GitHub: https://github.com/hadley Hadley’s website: https://hadley.nz/ Resources mentioned in the video and chat: Posit AI / Posit Assistant waitlist → https://posit.co/products/ai/ Tidy Tuesday Dataset → https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/data/2026/2026-02-17/readme.md#agricultural-production-statistics-in-new-zealand nanoparquet (R package) → https://nanoparquet.r-lib.org/ Databot → https://positron.posit.co/databot.html wbstats (R package for WorldBank API) → https://github.com/gshs-ornl/wbstats World Bank NZ data → https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=NZ Hadley & Joe’s posit::conf talk ft. Hadley’s demo of ggbot2 → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSFHQWGyRzo Wikimedia: New Zealand Total Population → https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:New_Zealand_Total_Population.tab Posit Conf Talk: James Wade’s “Disposable Shiny Apps” → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smnrmTtoiOM Hadley’s unhinged {genzplyr} (R package) →https://github.com/hadley/genzplyr Simon Couch’s blog post on evaluating LLMs → https://posit.co/blog/python-llm-evaluation/ Garrick Aden-Buie mentioned working on a collection of skills → https://github.com/posit-dev/skills Max Woolf’s blog post “Does Offering ChatGPT a Tip Cause it to Generate Better Text?” → https://minimaxir.com/2024/02/chatgpt-tips-analysis/ Cat Hicks’s skill for coding agents that lets you learn from the agent → https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities (but also see her great thread on bluesky! https://bsky.app/profile/grimalkina.bsky.social/post/3mevvbm3a6s26 )
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Timestamps of Questions / Topics 00:00 Introduction 01:17 Posit Assistant and using an agents.md file 02:54 Downloading TidyTuesday data using Posit Assistant 04:38 “Why use Parquet files over CSVs?” 07:11 Oops, switching Hadley’s mic, sorry! 09:27 Creating a visualization of sheep populations 10:28 “When would you switch models to Opus?” 13:28 “Do we have a Gen-Z human in the loop to verify the syntax?” (We did, folks, we did) 13:54 “How many bow ties does Hadley own?”
14:24 Asking the AI to retrieve real New Zealand population data 15:25 “Can the Posit Assistant use voice to text so people don’t have to type…?” 18:40 “What’s the purpose of the agents.md file and what goes in there?” 20:59 “How does posit AI in RStudio compare with the current positron AI assistants?” 22:39 “Will all the code generated by Posit assistant be stored in the session somehow to let somebody review what the agent generated?” 26:08 Having the AI create a Quarto report 26:54 “Does Posit Assistant also support Skills Files?” 27:49 “Were we always able to add agents.md in Positron too?” 28:17 “Did Hadley choose the name agents for agents.md or does each session have an agents file similar to having a README.md?” 29:57 Fixing the AI-chosen plot theme 31:55 “Is any of the stuff that it’s put in the report in Gen-Z speak, or is it only what it’s returning to you in the chat?” 33:24 “Can Posit Assistant create a renv as well?” 35:39 “Is Claude also the best for Python code?” 36:20 “If you add a behavior or a requirement to agents.md, does it take that new info in on the fly as you continue prompting?” 37:40 “What if you ask the agent why something happened?” 40:31 Investigating AI speculations about dairy cattle numbers 41:15 “Do you still need to know how to code in 2026?” 41:42 “Does using caps lock increase the likelihood that the LLM is going to listen to your agents.md file?” 45:47 “Could Hadley have done this faster without an AI?” 47:26 Hadley had AI do text clustering on image descriptions (previous TidyTuesday dataset) 48:41 Hadley had AI make a Shiny app to explore cluster sizes (previous TidyTuesday dataset) 52:53 “If one of the best ways to learn how to read code is to write code, what’s gonna happen if we’re writing it less?” 54:05 Wrap up and Posit AI waitlist information
Garrick Aden-Buie, Hadley Wickham, Simon Couch
ggbot2
nanoparquet
Positron
Quarto
renv
rstudio
Shiny